Design Thinking at a glance – An overview of models along with enablers and barriers of bringing it to the workplace and life

Today’s rapid-changing environment requires individuals, organizations and society-at-large to faster react, act, and proactively shape the future. Design thinking has become a popular innovation method to help proactively design a future to look forward to. However, many design thinking efforts do not go beyond short-term workshops and mini-projects and neglect the longer-term successful implementation of design thinking in organization which is often challenging. Therefore, this paper aims to shed light on the enablers and barriers of successfully implementing design thinking in organizations by providing a first conceptual overview of the enablers and barriers on an organizational and individual level to inform, educate and motivate researchers, practitioners, and educational institutions to discuss and implement design thinking programs in the future more carefully.